Accounting software vendor FreshBooks has received $43 million in Series B Funding. The cloud company says it will use the funds to support North American growth and to development of its latest product, launched in September.

Syspro has jumped on the chatbot bandwagon with the introduction of Ken. The manufacturing software publisher says Ken can handle more than 150 skill sets for routine tasks such as checking stock availability, pricing configured products, checking account balances and order statuses.

Add another name to the "talk to your software" realm as Infor has introduced Coleman an artificial intelligence platform for Infor CloudSuite applications. Coleman follows the push by SAP for its Leonardo platform,  a broad Internet of Things system that also has voice response and Sage's Pegg chatbot.